How to Create a Course from a Book
If you've got a book you keep meaning to turn into a course or a talk that you've given 50 times, you already know the advice. Just turn it into a course, of course!
Record the chapters, slap them behind a login, bing, bam, boom, you're done.
My last guest, Wayne, came in with that plan. But he also had a hard drive full of other people's courses he had bought, pressed play, and then never finished.
He didn’t want that for his own course, so he set the bar real high when he came in: the course should feel like he's at your desk encouraging you through it.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (my audio break down of how this applies to you)
Lands on October 1st.
Short story? We didn't turn the book into a course in the last episode. The book, for Wayne, is going to stay the story, and the course gets built out of the actions in it. With Wayne's coaching questions, of course, as the architecture, because he asks fantastic questions. So, if you're sitting on your content that you keep meaning to convert into something that looks and smells like a learning experience, that difference is the whole episode.
Converting Your Book Into a Course Isn’t Just Pressing Play
The thing that makes converting content like a book sneaky is that the better your thing already is, the more tempting it is to, like, just leave it alone and just change the format. Why rebuild something that works? Wayne's book works.
And that's what makes it a really good example. He's a speaker, author, life coach, and he's been at this since before anybody called it coaching. His mission is to get coaching onto Main Street, but one-on-one is hard to schedule, and it's hard to afford, and so he's betting on the one-to-many to create access.
The book is called Freshly Brewed Coaching. It's about 100 pages, and it's a business fable.
The goal is moving folks from “someday I will” to “name the dream, turn it into a goal, so we can actually take action.” He came in action oriented, but also with a particular question.
What does it look like to record 100 pages of a book with a community to support it?
A fear that stops a lot of people, including Wayne, is that you open the door and nobody comes in.
The answer to the first question? You don’t. And that's because a book and a course
want different things from you. A book assumes that you're consuming. A good one
also gets you connecting and seeing your own life in the story. But a course, has to be built around what the learner does.
If you move the book straight across into a course, you've just made a potentially more engaging version, or a prettier version, of the book, but it doesn’t reach the goal of the course.
If you rely on just recording and providing information, even if it's through well-told stories, then you run into putting up barriers.
Emotions do a lot of work in determining whether or not learning sticks.
We tend to remember that about kids, but it's easy to forget that adults are the same way.
We have emotions, and those emotions impact our experiences. So that frustration with being given info with no real direction is a sure fire way to get an adult learner to put your course on the digital shelf to collect dust.
Three Things To Take Away If YOU’VE Been Wondering How to Create a Course from a Book
All three of these bite-sized BS free breakthroughs are really around the same question: what are you carrying from format to format. In Wayne’s case, he’s trying to make one-to-one coaching accessible and knows that stories help keep folks engaged. But stories on their own don’t get people to action.
Bringing the Storytelling, but NOT Leading with It
Your stories will be gold in the course, but if we start with stories, we only end up telling instead of helping them do. A book is built for reading, and a course is built for doing. Wayne's instinct was that the book had a course in it, and he's right.
The course is the set of actions that are already buried in the chapters, for him. So, every place where the reader is supposed to actually do something, but the book doesn't outline HOW is exactly where you want to start.
Homework for Wayne looked like going through the book and pulling those out. Because once those actions are laid out, we can see the shape of the whole learning journey. We can see the bridges that need building between one action and the next. That support that someone's going to need to get from one side of the bridge to the other.
THEN the stories, the book, gets woven back around the doing.
The content follows the action.
So you need enough of the narrative, we don't want 100 pages in there, to carry that action, and nothing more. And that is going to be hard, because as an expert, you know a lot of things that you want to give to the person that you're trying to help.
They don’t need it all right now.
So the whole thing doesn't have to become a video. Some of it can actually stay reading. Some of it can become an audio. Some of it is actually designed or was written to become a worksheet.
But the format of these things follows the action and what the people that are taking it actually need.
IF seeing the whole thing on two screens is too much, because that can be, you can print it, cut it up, move things around physically. Index cards still exist, I know, because I had a client who used them because they were struggling to “see it.” I used to print papers in high school, and physically cut them up, and physically move paragraphs around.
Because past a certain length, you can't hold the whole shape in your head, even if you can see it on a screen. So, if you're building a course from a book, a workshop, or any content-first thing, pull the actions out first and build around those.
Your Follow-up Questions are How the Coaching Get Baked In
That's the piece that most people forget about, or don't think to include when they move a book or coaching into a course. It’s the piece that they're often afraid of losing.
So you might put the good opening questions in your book and call it done, which works for the book.
If you do that in a course, learners give surface-level questions, or they freeze, and if the goal is to shift AND still help them get success, you need to preemptively create the tools for them to dig themselves out.
So the fix that I talked through with Wayne was that for each key question, mapping out the branch sort of like a decision tree.
If this answer came easily, what would you ask next?
If the person struggled, what would you ask instead?
This is thinking about and mapping out pathways through the questions that can let the course adapt, even just a little bit, to where the person that's learning actually is.
It won't be as bespoke as live coaching, and it often doesn't have to be. It just has to be personalized enough that people don't stall on the first hard question.
If what you sell in your one-on-one is conversation, the follow-ups are critical. Map out the different ways that you would follow up to those hard questions.
Open the door before you build the course.
A lot of business owners who are creating courses and communities are afraid of empty rooms and zero sales. Wayne admitted that up front.
It’s a common fear because courses are time and energy. If you’re not sure if it’s the right move for you, I do have a quiz to help you answer that question.
Communities also do need kind of a critical mass, before they start to feel alive, like there's people in there being active.
What Wayne was forgetting was that he did already have readers. There were people that bought the book, that connected with it. And that is just a community that hasn't been invited anywhere yet.
For Wayne, instead of waiting for the course to launch a community, we're flipping the order, opening a space now for people going through the book.
A place to share where you're stuck, to share where you're winning. And so, by the time the course is actually built, that room is warm, and the audience is warmer than having just bought a book.
Wayne did say that he tried building a community as the offering in the past.
And in his words, “the people who joined are stuck there,” The community gives people a place to share the doing, but it can't replace the doing.
That original community didn't have anything to organize around, which means it might stall, but if you center it on the goal that the course WILL be working towards, then you can organize discussions and events around that piece.
If you're afraid of an empty room, look at who's already bought from you, because that's your starting point, and then give the room something to move through that will hold the community together.
How to Apply This to YOUR Book to Course Conversion
Step 1: Pull the action out of whatever you're building from.
Always start with the action: whether that's a book, a workshop, a coaching framework, a signature talk, every place where someone should be going and doing something with the information that you're providing.
Write that down, because this is your course skeleton.
And it's gonna show you where any gaps are between activities.
Step 2: Prewrite Follow-Ups.
Half the battle with courses that will have a self-study component is proactively getting ahead of issues. To do this one, take two of the most important questions that you ask clients, and for each one.
Write the follow-up, right? And these should be hard questions. Think about the questions that you always have to follow up on.
Map out those follow-up questions based on whether the answer came easily, and whether it didn't.
And that's the start of your pathways through the learning material.
If you’ve got a book you want to convert into a course, grab a strategy session and I’ll get ya on the right path to the course being successful.